Had she ever visited Denton at the asylum, or had her parents forbidden contact? Had she planned, at some point, to talk to her brother about his crimes? Tried to make sense of events that defied explanation?
If so, Denton’s death had killed any hope.
Years later, she decided to look for answers anyway.
Learning about the Ardullo murders must have seemed like salvation.
The parallels between the two cases chilled my blood. I could only imagine how
Claire had felt, spooling microfiche, only to come upon Denton’s doppelganger in
Ardis Peake.
First, shock. Then sickening, spreading familiarity, empathy in its worst incarnation.
Finally, a glimmer of reprieve: one last chance to tackle the Big Why.
Now that I knew what I did, Claire’s move to Starkweather, her zeroing in on Ardis
Peake, wasn’t puzzling at all.
So many madmen, so little time.
Not a choice, really. A psychologically preordained dance backed by the choreography of pain.
A dead certainty.
26.
“No LUCK,” SAID Milo.
“On what?”
“Anything. The Corvette, any sort of locale on either Wark or Derrick Crimmins. No
Social Security on Wark, and Crim-mins’s last tax filing was ten years ago. In
Florida. Didn’t get to take it any further ’cause I was tied up in the courthouse.
Trying to get three separate judges to okay warrants on Peake’s mail and his phone calls. No go. Prophecy didn’t impress them. The third one laughed me out of chambers and told me to consult a palm reader.”
It was nearly five. He’d pulled up in my driveway a few minutes ago. Now he was scrounging in the fridge, bent sharply as he eyed a lower shelf, the ridges and bulges of his service revolver protruding through his too-tight tweed jacket.
“Claire’s relationship to Peake didn’t matter?” I said.
He shook his head, pulled out mayonnaise, mustard, a packet of corned beef I’d forgotten about, got some corn rye of similar vintage from the bread box. Slapping together a limp-looking sandwich, he sat down, chomped out a semicircle.
” ‘Gobbledygook’ was the operative word,” he said. “And ‘psychotic meanderings.’
They all said Peake was, at most, a material witness. If that. Also, his mental state rendered him unlikely to provide significant materiality, so the entire rationale falls apart.”
Another chunk of sandwich disappeared. “I didn’t do any better on getting into
Wark’s B. of A. account. A fictitious person only remotely and theoretically associated with an eight-month-old homicide doesn’t cut the evidentiary mustard.”
“Mommy,” I said, “I wanna be a policeman when I grow up.”
His grin was savage. “Now for the happy news: Wendell Pelley is no longer a suspect.
At least not for the Beatty brothers. Wendell Pelley is deceased. For well over a week- before choo choo bang bang. His body showed up in a county garbage dump in
Lennox six days ago. Sheriff’s deputy happened to read the wire I put out and called. The dump’s organized, so they were able to pinpoint what load Pelley came in on. Commercial container behind an industrial laundry. It was collected three days before he was found, but the maggot feast indicates Pelley could have been in there a while before that. No sign of violence to the corpse. Looks like he fell asleep in the Dumpster and got shipped out with the trash.”
“Crushed to death?”
“No, they spotted him before compaction-what was left of him. Cause of death was extreme dehydration and malnutrition. The sonofabitch starved himself. I called the
Korean who runs the halfway house. He said yeah, Pelley hadn’t been eating much before he split. Probably weighed a hundred and twenty back then. No, he didn’t see that as reason for alarm, Pelley wasn’t causing problems.”
“Talk about self-punishment,” I said. “Pelley made it all the way from Ramparts to
Lennox on foot?”
“He probably walked through alleys in some not-nice neighborhoods, found his final resting place, curled up, and died.”
“Not a trace of foul play?”
“Nothing, Alex. They filed it as a definite suicide. I read the report and it’s pretty clear. Desiccation, cachexia, low hemoglobin count, something about his liver chemistry that said he hadn’t received adequate nutrition for a long time. No wounds, no broken bones; his neck bones were intact, and so was his skull. The only damage was what the maggots had done.”